HMS Agamemnon: The Battleship That Hosted an Armistice and Then Became a Target

Built in the Shadow of a Revolution

HMS Agamemnon had the misfortune of being designed at the exact wrong moment in battleship history. She was one of two Lord Nelson-class pre-dreadnought battleships, the last of that older type the Royal Navy ever built, and construction was well under way when HMS Dreadnought came along in 1906 and rendered the entire pre-dreadnought concept obsolete almost overnight.

To add insult to injury, some of Agamemnon's own 12-inch guns were actually diverted to speed up Dreadnought's completion, delaying Agamemnon's own finish by months amid labour troubles at her builder, William Beardmore and Company's Dalmuir yard, where she had the distinction of being the very first warship built.

Laid down on 15 May 1905 and launched on 23 June 1906, she was not finally commissioned until 25 June 1908, at a cost of just over £1.65 million, arriving into service as, in effect, yesterday's design.

Her first commanding officer, appointed on 21 May 1907, was Captain Sackville Carden. The name should stop you. Eight years later, as a vice admiral, Carden was the officer commanding in the Eastern Mediterranean who drew up and began the naval attack on the Dardanelles, and who collapsed under the strain of it and was relieved days before the disastrous attempt to force the straits on 18 March 1915. Agamemnon was in that line of battleships, taking twelve hits in twenty-five minutes. The officer who had brought her into commission had sent her there. Her second captain, from December 1908, was Bernard Currey, who went on to command the 5th Battle Squadron in the Channel Fleet after the outbreak of war and later served as senior naval officer at Gibraltar, and her captain from 1911 to 1914 was Arthur Hayes-Sadler, another officer whose career the Dardanelles would eventually swallow.

A Quiet Start

On paper, at least, she remained a formidable ship even if her design had been overtaken. Fully loaded she displaced almost 17,700 tons on a hull 443 feet 6 inches long with a beam of nearly 80 feet, protected by a waterline belt up to 12 inches thick and turret armour as heavy as 13.5 inches.

Her main armament ran to four 12-inch guns in twin turrets fore and aft, backed by ten 9.2-inch guns and two dozen smaller 12-pounders, with five submerged torpedo tubes and stowage for 23 torpedoes besides. Twin triple-expansion engines fed by fifteen boilers gave her a top speed of 18 knots, and she carried a wartime crew of over 800 officers and men.

Her early peacetime years were unremarkable, serving with the Home Fleet's Nore Division, save for one embarrassing moment in February 1911 when she grazed an uncharted rock in the harbour at Ferrol in Spain and damaged her hull. It was a minor prelude to a war that would treat her rather more roughly.

She was also, briefly, a small piece of the future. At the end of 1909 she was allocated one of eleven new short-distance radio sets, to be fitted at her next refit behind armour near the fore bridge, with the specific intention of replacing signal flags for close-range work between ships. It is a nice measure of how fast everything was changing that a battleship made obsolete by Dreadnought was simultaneously among the first in the fleet to be given a radio.

Into the Dardanelles

When war broke out in 1914, Agamemnon initially covered the transport of the British Expeditionary Force to France and patrolled the Channel, before being sent to the Mediterranean in February 1915 for what became the Dardanelles campaign, one of the war's most costly and controversial operations.

On 7 August 1914 she joined the Channel Fleet's 5th Battle Squadron, working out of Portland and Sheerness, which is where the covering of the Expeditionary Force's passage to France was run from.

She arrived on 19 February and went straight into action against Ottoman coastal forts, and over the following weeks took an extraordinary battering for a single ship.

On 25 February she was struck by seven 9.4-inch shells in ten minutes, holed above the waterline, and lost three men killed. On 7 March, Fort Hamidieh landed eight large-calibre hits on her, including one especially large round, reportedly 14 inches, that wrecked her quarterdeck, wardroom and gunroom alike, though she remained fully capable of fighting and steaming throughout.

On 18 March she was hit twelve times in 25 minutes by a howitzer battery; five of the rounds were armour-piercing shells that did no real harm against her belt and turrets, but the other seven struck less protected parts of the ship, causing structural damage and putting one of her 12-inch guns temporarily out of action.

By any reasonable measure, Agamemnon absorbed as much punishment in a few weeks off the Dardanelles as most battleships saw in their entire careers, and kept fighting throughout.

She went on to support the main Allied landings from late April, taking two further hits from field artillery between 28 and 30 April and providing fire support against an Ottoman counterattack on 1 May, before bombarding enemy batteries on 6 May ahead of the Second Battle of Krithia.

Even as late as December 1915 she was still bombarding targets ashore, joining HMS Endymion and the small monitor HMS M33 in an attack on the Kavak bridge.

That last detail has an unexpected postscript. HMS M33, the small monitor that shelled the Kavak bridge alongside her, is still afloat. She sits today in Dry Dock 1 at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, one of only three Royal Navy ships surviving from the First World War and the only surviving veteran of Gallipoli. If you want to stand on a deck that was in company with Agamemnon in December 1915, you can, for the price of a ticket.

A Zeppelin, and an Armistice

With the Dardanelles campaign wound up by January 1916, Agamemnon settled into duty with the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, later renamed the Aegean Squadron, based at Mudros and tasked with protecting Allied-held islands, supporting the Salonika front, and watching for any attempt by the German battlecruiser Goeben to break out into the wider Mediterranean.

In one particularly satisfying episode on 5 May 1916, her gunners used 12-pounder fire to damage the German Zeppelin LZ-85 over Salonika badly enough to force it down, a rare battleship-versus-airship engagement.

Her most historically significant moment, however, involved no shooting at all. On 30 October 1918, with Captain Frederick S. Litchfield-Speer in command of the ship, the Ottoman Minister of Marine Affairs, Rauf Bey, later known as Rauf Orbay, signed the Armistice of Mudros aboard Agamemnon on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, while Admiral Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, signed for the Allies, as she lay at anchor in Lemnos.

The French Vice Admiral Jean Amet had wanted a seat at the table too, but the British negotiators kept the talks a strictly Anglo-Ottoman affair, and the terms took effect at noon the following day, formally ending the war in the Middle Eastern theatre.

It is a striking thing for a ship that had spent 1915 being pounded by Ottoman shore batteries to end up, three years later, playing host to the very armistice that took the Ottoman Empire out of the war altogether.

Reinvented as a Target

Agamemnon returned home and was paid off into reserve in March 1919, and by rights her story should have ended there, in a quiet scrapping like so many other obsolete pre-dreadnoughts.

Instead, she was chosen, ahead of her old rival HMS Hibernia, for a novel second career: becoming the Royal Navy's first radio-controlled target ship, a project championed by Admiral David Beatty to give gunnery crews realistic practice against a full-sized, manoeuvring battleship rather than a static hulk.

Stripped of most of her armament and equipment but keeping her distinctive 12-inch turrets for visual realism, she was rewired for radio control at Chatham between December 1920 and April 1921, retaining a skeleton crew of 153 for trials work.

What followed was an unusual and slightly grim sequence of experiments: exposure to poison gas trials in March 1921, strafing by aircraft machine guns that September, and years of being deliberately shelled with 6-inch, 5.5-inch and 4.7-inch rounds by the battlecruisers HMS Renown and HMS Repulse, all in the name of working out exactly how much punishment a modern warship could take.

The gas trial found that fumes could seep into an unsealed hull through hatches and vents, though the finding had limited value for a properly closed-up fighting ship; the strafing trial showed that machine-gun fire from the air could harass a crew but not seriously impair a battleship's ability to fight or steam, useful evidence in deciding how much armour bridge crews actually needed; and the years of shelling by Renown and Repulse suggested that a ship as well protected as Agamemnon, or the newer dreadnoughts built along similar lines, could take considerable damage to her upper works from smaller-calibre fire without losing her fighting power or her ability to steam.

The Last of Her Kind

The demotion was thorough in ways the paperwork records better than the photographs. From her recommissioning in July 1920 she was commanded by commanders rather than captains, which in the Royal Navy is a statement about a ship's standing as much as about her size. She recommissioned once more at Portsmouth on 17 March 1924 for service with the Atlantic Fleet, still being shot at on purpose.

Agamemnon carried on in this role until December 1926, when she was finally relieved as target ship by the more modern dreadnought HMS Centurion. By this point she held a genuine historical distinction: she was the last British pre-dreadnought battleship still in existence, the final survivor of an entire generation of warship rendered obsolete the moment she was launched.

She was sold to shipbreakers J. Cashmore of Newport on 24 January 1927 and left Portsmouth on 1 March 1927 to be broken up, closing out a career that had somehow managed to be outdated from birth, battered nearly beyond recognition at the Dardanelles, host to an armistice, and finally, deliberately, used as target practice, all in less than twenty years.